Ruth Lindemann

LINDEMANN: I have a clear memory of the beginning of the Nazi era in Vienna because it happened to be — my birthday is in February, and they were having a little birthday party for me, my first and probably my last childhood birthday party, and I was really looking forward to it. I had a good time. There were friends and relatives there, and I got presents. But just as the party was coming to an end and people were leaving, somebody turned on the radio. There was this man yelling on the radio, and everybody became very quiet. Being five years old, I was starting to listen. He was yelling and screaming something about Jewish people. It had never really occurred to me that I was Jewish. My parents weren’t really that observant, although I knew that we were.

That’s when I began to have inklings of problems and trouble. My parents never said much about it. That night they put me to bed and left the door open a little bit to the room I was sleeping in, and some of the adults had stayed after the party. Of course, I heard the adults talking. I really didn’t understand much of what they said, but it was the tone of voice that I found very disturbing. They were talking. Some were saying we should leave. They were talking about going to America, to other places, South America. Very strange names of things I’d never heard before.

I began to be afraid. I’d never really been that afraid before, and there was this little knot of fear that began in the pit of my stomach. It never has gone away since then; it’s gotten bigger and smaller, but it’s still there. And that’s when I first became aware that we were in danger. That was the beginning.

My life went on pretty much as normal for a few more months. As I said, this was in February, and in March is when the Anschluss happened, when Austria became a part of Germany. It was a state, a part of Germany. Then things began to change. Somewhere in April my mother and I went to go take a walk in the park on a Saturday afternoon, as was our habit. We started to go into the park, and this boy ran up to us and said, “You can’t go in there.” My mother stopped for a minute. I had sort of skipped ahead of her, and she grabbed my hand and turned me around, and we walked away very quickly. Of course, I didn’t find out until much later in my life that this park, where she had played as a little girl and where my grandmother had played as a little girl, was now closed to Jews. They were not allowed to go into the park. The boy knew us. In the neighborhoods in Vienna, everybody knew everybody. It’s a big city, but the neighborhoods were everybody knew people.

In fact, that day we walked down to the Danube Canal, where there is an esplanade to walk on with park benches. By then I was getting very tired because we had walked quite a ways and I wanted to sit down. There were little signs on the benches, and my mother said they said, “Wet Paint,” and we can’t sit on there. But I saw other people sitting there, and of course, being five years old and precocious I probably started to nag her about, “What do you mean we can’t sit there?” But again, later on I found out that she was trying to protect me. It had said Jews are forbidden to sit there. So it crept up on us little by little.

That summer I went to stay with my grandmother, who lived in a little village up in the mountains. I had gone there all my previous summers as a little girl, but this summer turned out different. My grandmother was very observant, and she lived in this fairly large house with her sister. They were both widowed, had lost their husbands in the First World War, so my grandmother had gotten a license to run a tobacco store and grocery store. That’s how widows were able to make a living. Almost all the tobacco licenses are given to widows, by the way, in Europe.

So anyway, I went to stay with them in the summer because Vienna’s very hot and my parents both worked. I always went with my grandmother on Fridays after she got the bread. She kneaded bread, these big round loaves of rye bread. My mouth starts watering just talking about it after all these years [laughs]. They were real big, crusty loaves of rye bread. She would put them on a board and take them to the town baker because he had the big brick ovens that could handle the big round loaves. We would go there and leave the loaves to bake, and then we would go next door to the little inn or tavern, and I would get a raspberry drink or something. This was a big deal for me because, well, that was entertainment. We didn’t have a lot of that in those days.

That day my aunt walked into the bakery, and the man said, “I can’t bake your bread anymore.” He’d been baking that bread for my aunt and my grandmother since they were little girls. They were the third generation to live in this little town. He had gone to school with my aunt. He called her by her first name, so you knew that they knew each other very well. He said, “Francie, I can’t do this anymore.” She said, “What?” He said, “It’s against the law to do any business with Jews.” She said, “It never stopped you before.” He said, “No. New laws.” Then his son came in with the swastika armband, so my aunt knew.

We didn’t have radios or anything, but the word got around very quickly, and my aunt knew what was going on. She took her board of bread, and we turned around and went home. No raspberry drink for me that day. To me that was really bad, so I remember that very well. I don’t remember how they finally baked the bread, probably cut it up and put it in smaller pieces because all they had was a little wood stove to cook in. What I’m trying to say here is how pervasive this new government was after the Anschluss. There was no little village that was left alone and no Jewish family that was left to its own devices after that.

So anyway, that September my mother picked me up at my grandmother’s. It was about a two-hour train ride to go back to Vienna, and when we got off the train it was getting toward evening, and the whole city looked so festive. There were swastika flags all over, red and white flags all over the place, and there was this celebration-type atmosphere. My mother and I started to walk, and usually we would go to the streetcar. My mother said, “No, no. We’ve been sitting on the train for two hours. We need the exercise.” So we walked home, and that was a good two-hour walk, I’m sure, to get back to where we lived. But it was because Jewish people could not ride the streetcars. I think the train was still okay if you had a certain kind of pass or something. I do know we rode the train, and that was later a very difficult thing to do, too. However, the streetcars were forbidden. All public transportation was forbidden to Jews, and they randomly looked at papers.

In Europe, your religion was on your internal papers. Everyone carried papers. There were no really free countries in that era in Europe. My parents saw a big change from the First World War when everybody lived under an emperor to a democracy like we have here. People were voting, and they were very patriotic Austrians. I can only guess, and I’m sure, [although] they never spoke about how betrayed they must have felt because suddenly they were no longer considered people at all with any rights. They had really been hopeful for a democratic-type government there and a different kind of life than they finally wound up with. That was my experience as we went along.

And of course, our lives changed from one day to the next. I went to kindergarten. I was going to a Montessori school. We had a maid because my mom worked, as I said, and [she and] my dad both were employed. Mitzi was usually the one that would take me to kindergarten and pick me up afterwards right around noon. Well, this one day she had taken me in the morning, but my mother came to pick me up, and that was already a surprise. However, she sort of glossed over it and said, “We have to hurry. We have to go home.” We walked very quickly through the back streets and did shortcuts.

I must have whined a lot because I used to go with Mitzi — especially this was in November, the 10th of November to be exact — and usually we went down the main streets because there were toy stores. They were decorated for Christmas already, and I enjoyed seeing that. We didn’t have TV and all these things for kids to see, and looking at toy stores was a big deal in those days.

So I must have whined at her about not doing that, but we walked through the back streets and finally got to a corner near our apartment when one of my mother’s cousins came running up very excited, very upset. She told my mom that they had taken away all the men. My mother was very perturbed also. She tightened her grip on my hand and dragged me along as fast as she could, and we got to the door where we would go up to our apartment. The apartment manager was there, and my mother asked her, “Where’s my husband?” She said, “My son took him to the police station. We arrested all the Jewish men in Vienna.” That’s where they had taken everybody. That was Kristallnacht.

So we ran to the police station, which wasn’t that far away. I remember going up the steps into the foyer there, and mom knew the man behind the desk also. They called each other by their first names. They had grown up together. She asked him, “Where’s my husband?” He told her, “We had to arrest everybody. We took them to the train station. Don’t worry about Leo. He’s a decent man. Nothing’s going to happen to him.” As I said, my mother was really perturbed about all this, and she was saying things that I had never heard my mother say before. She was very angry.

We ran down the steps and out to the main street. Then I saw why we had not walked the main street coming home. We were walking along, and we were ankle-deep in glass. There was glass all over. As I’m sure everyone knows by now, the windows were all broken the night before. We walked along, and as you looked down the side streets, there were buildings burning, possibly synagogues. I was a little girl, and I wanted to see the fires, but mom wouldn’t let me. She kept dragging me along. We got to the train station, and there was nobody there. It was [German word, aus?] Bahnhof [train station].

There were a few people lounging around. Then she asked one of the guards there, somebody, “What happened to the train and all the men?” He said, “We took them all to Dachau, to the concentration camp.” Then we started walking home, and it was getting dark and it started to snow. I was really very tired by then. I hadn’t had any lunch. Usually, I’d be home for lunch. We had been walking and running for hours that day, and I got very sick.

I don’t remember a lot about the next month or two. However, I do remember somewhere near New Year’s eve because some friends came to visit my mom New Year’s eve, and they were in Gestapo uniforms. They were friends of hers, people she had known all her life, people she had belonged to the hiking clubs with and had parties with, knew from work. They came over and were friends of ours. My father was still at Dachau, and my mother was trying to find how to get him out. I think knowing these people might have helped. I was a little kid. I really don’t know any of those details. I just know they were there in the house and that it was New Year’s and that they were congratulating each other about New Year’s. Not my mother necessarily, but each other.

Shortly thereafter, they came — when I say they, the people with really black boots and guns — and they said we had to move. My mother and I had to go move to the ghetto area, another apartment. Now people have often asked me, and I’ve talked to quite a few school kids, “Did we wear a yellow star? Were we locked up in a ghetto?” No, we did not wear a yellow star. In Vienna, there was just this one section where the Jewish people were going to go all live until they sent them away. And that’s where we lived, in just a tiny room with a bathroom down the hall where there was a toilet but no running water. We could go out in the hall and get a little water. And a little gas burner, and that was it. We lived there probably all that winter and part of the next winter. That was ’39 and ’40, two years, and it was precarious to say the least. My mother must have been absolutely terrified all the time because any knock on the door meant they’d come to get you to take you away.

They started a little school for the kids, and I did go to school there. It was just two or three rooms in an old building, and there were two classes. The teachers were very old men that had retired, that the Nazis didn’t feel they needed to take to the concentration camp. They were holding these people for ransom in the concentration camp. That was their first idea. They felt that all Jews were wealthy. They needed to hold them, and they would be paid off, and they would have to leave the country. We weren’t wealthy. My folks were very low-paid people. My mother was a secretary, and my dad was a warehouseman. They picked up everybody; they didn’t care. You had very little chance of getting out of there if you didn’t have enough money.

Of course, they kept picking up the women and children — there were only women and children left, practically — on a daily basis. I would get to school some days, and a little kid would be there, somebody sitting next to me, crying and crying. When he got home that night his mom was gone or his grandma or whoever it was he was living with, and the neighbors took him in, or her. So every day when I got home from school, which was around 1:00 or 2:00 PM in the afternoon, if my mom was there I was very, very grateful. We began to get used to it. It was very strange, but you realized you got home and maybe they weren’t going to be there. And my mother probably worried about me getting home, too, because you had to walk a few blocks. Across the street was the Aryan section, and there were boys over there always throwing snowballs with rocks in them, and one day we stopped and threw some back. Boy, you should have heard my mom when I told her we did that. It was a very frightening time, especially for the adults.

During those two winters, whenever there was a snowstorm, they would come knocking at our door — usually in the middle of the night, at 2:00 or 3:00 AM in the morning — to go out and shovel snow. The little kids and the women had to go shovel snow. We did this more than once, and hearing that knock in the middle of the night was always terrible. I think it was about four times that we had to do this. Fortunately, that wasn’t what they wanted; they just had us shovel the snow. Hundreds of people and little kids just shoveling snow, and guards, of course. One day I forgot my mittens, or gloves or whatever I had for my hands, I don’t remember. I got down there, and I was really, really cold, and they had fires going for the guards in big barrels. This guard came over and asked if I wanted to go warm my hands. I know now, and I even knew it then, I didn’t really want to go. He took a chance. He took a real serious chance. They were not supposed to be nice to us about anything. He just saw this little girl without gloves, and he actually went over there.

My mother was writing letters to America. They were not at war with America. So finally we did get some paperwork from one of her cousins who had immigrated before WWI even. He happened to be a dentist and was able to send an affidavit which said that he would support us if we came, and we finally got paperwork that we could go to the United States. In the meantime, my mother’s trying to get my father out of the concentration camp. Fortunately, she had friends. She was able to sell things. The thing is that we didn’t own anything anymore. People could walk into your place and take whatever they wanted, and if you tried to stop them and they killed you, they’d probably get a medal. It was very difficult for people like my mom, who’d had a lot of friends that were not Jewish, to know who to trust because you just didn’t know. And many of them turned on us. However, she must have had some because she sold some furniture and eventually was able to pay somebody enough to get my dad out, and he escaped to Sweden. He got to the United States just before the war started with Europe.

My mother and I, in the meantime, after almost two years in that little room up there, were able to leave to go to America. We packed up our stuff, and then my mom got it into her head she had to go say goodbye to my grandmother, who was still out in the little village. So we walked to the train. I think she must have got a permit or something, but we did walk to the train. When we got to my grandmother’s — now this was such a little town that they didn’t have a train depot. You had to tell somebody before you got on the train that you want to stop there, and they would stop and let you off, and you had to walk through all these meadows to get to where the little grocery store was where my grandmother was. Well, she had to sell the grocery store to a neighbor for one shilling, and that was no longer hers, but she still got to live in the house.

Mother and I got there, and my aunt was there with her twin daughters. They lived in Brno in Czechoslovakia, which is now the Czech Republic. The little girls were about my age. They were six. I was almost eight. Anyway, they were little twins, and we played together. My aunt had also came to say goodbye to us. I remember my mother saying, “You know, you have money.” Because my aunt and my uncle that in lived in Brno, he was an engineer. His company had been very well off, and they could have gone to America. They had enough money. They didn’t need an affidavit because they could prove they could support themselves. They decided they didn’t want to leave. My mother tried to keep telling her, “You’ve got to take those children out of this area.” And my aunt said, “No, the Czech people aren’t going to do anything like the Austrians. They’re nice. Austrians are mean, but the Czechs are a very different people.” And they did not make any move to leave, but that’s another story.

Anyway, we were sitting there taking with my grandma and my great-aunt when a neighbor came and knocked at the door, pounded actually, and screamed at us and said, “They’re coming to get you!” Sure enough, we were very quiet and we heard these dogs barking, and we heard boots marching on the gravel because the roads weren’t paved yet over there. We couldn’t believe it. Pretty soon they were pounding on the big doors that went to the delivery section of the grocery store, and my mother grabbed me just as my grandmother was getting up to open the door.

We ran into a little room that my grandmother rented out to mountain climbers, because this was at the foot of the Alps and in the summer people would come and rent the room. My mother grabbed me and shoved me into the room underneath a window seat — and the window was right there — and held me very tight. She had closed the door, and we sat in there. We sat in there for a long time. We heard a lot of noise, and she wouldn’t let me move. She had a sort of a fur trim or something on her sleeves and held those under my nose. I was just about to suffocate, but she held me so tight I couldn’t even sneeze. I was under there for a long time. It was getting dark by the time — everything was quiet, and we went out. We looked around, and there was nobody there. They had taken away my aunt and the twins and my grandma and my great-aunt.

It was getting dark, and we went outside. We walked down these steps through the little courtyard, out into the meadows to where the train tracks were, and we waited there a long time. It seemed like a long time to me. By then I had to go to the bathroom pretty bad, and that didn’t help me any. And I was really cold and wet. The dew was coming up. It was in May, but it’s cold there at night. We stood there a long time, and then the train came. My mom took out her white handkerchief, and we got on the train, and we took the train back to Vienna. I was still shaking. I assume my mother was, too. She never said anything to me at all.

When we got to Vienna that night, of course that was when the war was on already with Britain, and so there was a blackout. Vienna was all blacked out starting in ’39 when the war had started with England. It was very dark, and we got off the train. Of course, we didn’t take the streetcar, so we walked, and it was very dangerous because if we had been caught we would have been shot. We heard shots every night. People were out in the street. There was a curfew, and if you were out, you were shot.

We finally got to where we lived. Fortunately, my mother knew the city very well. After all, she did grow up there. We got into the little side street, and we heard the boots of the patrol. We couldn’t tell which way they were coming because the buildings are tall and narrow and it was echoing. Mom stopped. We were both very frightened, I’m sure. Anyway, there was this policeman that came by. Now he wasn’t one of the Nazi guards; he was just a policeman that wore the grey uniform with the big capes. And he pushed us into a doorway. He just sort of came by us, pushed us into a doorway and stood in front of us and held us there until the patrol went by, and then he stepped aside. I don’t think my mother and I even said anything to him, and it may be that he knew who she was. I really don’t know. All I know is that we walked that half a block to our apartment and got up there and were safe, but I’m sure he saved our lives. It was a very brave thing for him to do, actually, because people were killed for less then that.

What I’m trying to say with that little story is that at least twice somebody was compassionate, and this one man even took a chance, and I’m sure we wouldn’t have even gotten out if there hadn’t been others that helped. But for the most part, the people that we knew at that time in Austria were totally wrapped up in being Nazis, and they were sure that all Jews had to be sent out of Austria. If not killed, at least sent out of Austria. They were convinced of that. The meanness of people you had known all your lives was just devastating, devastating.

Anyway, in the next week or so we packed up our stuff and had permits to even call a cab, I think, so we could put things in and take them to the train depot. We took a train to Italy, and we were on our way to America. We arrived in New York. We didn’t have to go to Ellis Island because my mother’s cousin was there, the Menkes, and they picked us up. You only went to Ellis Island if no one was there to pick you up. We stayed overnight in Long Island. I remember they had a nice little house that we were just dazzled at. I’m sure it was just a Cape Cod, but it was beautiful.

Then we lived for a while in Maryland on a chicken ranch, where I learned how to pluck chickens. My mother had several cousins. Her mother’s sister had emigrated and had six children, and they all lived between Washington DC and New York. So the Washington DC cousins were in the chicken ranch business, although her husband worked for the government somewhere in Washington. Like I said, I learned how to pluck chickens. Here we were, we were from this big city and it was a mile to go to the mailbox. It was such a culture shock. Then, after a while, my mother said she’s got to find a job. So we moved back to Washington DC after she felt a little more confident of her English, and she cleaned houses like everybody else that came to this country when they first start out.

We lived there until the end of that next year when my father, who I said was in Sweden, got permission to come to America. There were some more affidavits that were sent. He had been training on a farm to learn how to be a dairy farmer. The Swedes needed help on their farms, so they imported a lot of these Jewish men that the people were trying to get rid of in Germany. My uncle, his brother, also got there. His sister and the twin girls and my uncle disappeared. It’s another story, but the Red Cross found out what happened to them, after 60 years. After 60y ears. I can’t emphasize that enough. They were meticulous, the Red Cross, and of course the Nazis kept meticulous records, so they were able to trace people.

However, I got to the West Coast because my dad came from Sweden across Russia and through Japan and across the Pacific and finally wound up in Portland. He had sent a telegram, and he said he’s going to Seattle, and that he’ll be there at such and such a time and would my mother and I come over there. You should have heard her aunt. Her aunt was still living, her mother’s sister, the one who had emigrated. She was in her 80s. My mother called her, I think, and she said, “My husband’s coming, and I want to go to meet him.” She said, “Where’s he coming to?” “It’s a place called Seatly.” And my aunt was yelling at her, and she said, “I’ve never heard of any place called Seatly.” She said, “You can’t go to the West Coast. You can’t take the child.” I was the only child in the family at that time. Everybody else was grown up. “You can’t take the child over there because there’s no culture and there’s no education, and you just can’t do this!” And my mom said, “But I have to. My husband wants me to come.”

So she went out and she borrowed $300 for the train fare from the Jewish Committee, and she paid it back. She kept all the slips, the receipts. She sent them five dollars a month for several years, many years obviously, to pay them back. After she passed away, I found all the paperwork, and it was among that. So anyway, we came out here to Portland. I went to 14 different schools in the 12 years of schooling, changed every few months. Sometimes I was somewhere for two or three years. Dad tried to find work, but he finally wound up working at Weyerhaeuser. I grew up in Longview, Washington, actually.

Well, I was seven and a half, and seven and a half is easier, but it was a shock. I knew no English. I only knew yes, no, please, and thank you. And my mom had to go to work. When we lived with the people in Maryland, the cousins spoke a little German, and besides we didn’t see any people, just chickens. I learned how to clean chicken coops, and I learned how to pluck chickens. I was only seven. My mother’s cousin gave me money to do things, and I did it, whatever it was, pick potato bugs. But when we got to Washington DC, they sent me to school. I remember at recess we went out on this playground and there were swings, and I’d never seen swings before, and it looked like a lot of fun. There were these little girls sitting on the swings, and they would yell, “Push!” and the teacher would come over and push them. So I went over and sat on a swing and yelled, “Push!” and that was my first real English word [laughter]. And I learned when you do that, the teacher comes over and pushes you.

The other thing is that I had learned how to write. I’d gone to school for a year and a half in Europe. Children there in the first and second grade learned how to write cursive. They learn addition, subtraction, and very basic multiplication, and division even. So I had a lot of math already. And of course this is still true. I don’t know where this country’s going to go like that, but in Europe the kids learn this stuff right off. You start another language in the first grade, too.

My mother was learning English, but my mother was learning British English because she had a lot of cousins, and one of them had gone to England early on in her life and had become a maid over there at first. Then she married the boss. Anyway, that’s a whole other story again. But my mother was sure she would go there eventually, so she learned like glasses are spectacles, and an umbrella is a bumbershoot. There were many, many words that everybody laughed at, and we didn’t know what she was talking about.

The other thing is, we eat with a knife and fork. In this country people lay down the stuff, and then take up the fork, and then they cut, and then they lay it down. By the time I’m seven and a half, I’m using both utensils. Now this is getting more common here now, but in the ’40s, that was a sure sign of an enemy alien person that was German possibly. I had to learn how to eat without my knife. Cut and then lay it down and change your fork around. So there were many cultural little things that I had to learn the first year there because otherwise it was difficult. People were beating me up all the time because I had an accent, and there was a very high attitude of animosity toward Germans at that time. I had no language to explain to them that I hated them worse than they did, but kids are cruel. It’s getting better, though. My daughter Tamara is a teacher. I’ve been to her classes, and she’s got a real rainbow coalition of kids from all kinds of countries.

There are still pockets of real serious prejudice. When I came to this country, we lived in Washington, like I said, so briefly my mother and I babysat for some people in Arlington. It’s a suburb of Washington, within sight of the Capitol dome, by the way. We took these little boys — they were three and four, and I was eight — we took them for walks in the park. And in the parks there were signs on the benches. I was able to read by then, and the signs said, “No Colored.” Now, we didn’t know what that meant. I knew about colored crayons and colored anything. So being a curious kid, and I always was, I asked when I got back. We took the kids home, and the mother came home, and I said, “We went to the park, and there were these things that said ‘No Colored.’ They don’t want people to color on the benches. Do people actually do that?” She said, “No, no, no. That means that niggers can’t sit on them.”

Well, this is 1940. We said “niggers.” I had been living in Washington all this time, we still did, in a Black section of Washington because that’s what we could afford. The white people that we lived with owned a little grocery store, and we lived above it in a little room. They didn’t live there, they just ran the grocery store, but they rented us the room. I played with these little Black kids, and they were much nicer to me than anybody else, okay? I’d never seen a Black person. I was a little leery about all this black skin. But my mom explained to me that it’s not going to come off. I didn’t care. Even then, at the ripe old age of eight, I was shocked that in this country there could be that sort of thing. So then, being a precocious brat, I said, “I saw a Black lady sitting on a bench.” Being where it said “No Jews,” it wouldn’t have occurred to us to sit on it, to break any rules. That’s another thing you’ve got to remember about Europeans. They didn’t break rules. “It’s OK,” the lady said to me, “for them to sit on a bench if they’re taking care of a white baby.” Well, those were the rules. A good portion, maybe half of our country, had those rules. So it is better.

[Tape stops and then restarts, picking up mid-sentence] we went through Texas. A friend of mine and her husband were living in Georgia. We travelled through Texas, but when we got to the Louisiana border, it was like a foreign country. In Texas they didn’t, but in Louisiana they had segregation. The waiting rooms for the next bus, everything was segregated, and the Black people had nowhere to eat. Totally. If there were any that were on the bus, which I can’t remember, they had to sit way in the back. To us this was foreign, very foreign, having grown up in Oregon, the whole idea of this type of segregation and how justified they felt in doing it. They felt that was the way it is; these are not really people. And we remembered how it felt to be “not really people.”

Interviewer: Do you have a statement on the wall? The Oregon Holocaust Memorial Wall. The plaques that they have up there?

LINDEMANN: Yes. I talked about Kristallnacht. That’s the day our lives changed. As I said, things were going along gradually, and we realized that it wasn’t a good place to live anymore, but it wasn’t until my dad was taken to Dachau that our lives changed from one day to the next. It was like living in another planet, like we had never experienced our neighbors or knew anybody anymore. It’s like transporting somebody from Earth to the moon, and having them try to get along. It was one day to the next. I never went back to kindergarten. I never experienced what you’d call normal living after that, not until we got here, and then WWII started, so things weren’t that normal, either, for a long time. In fact, in my lifetime, I don’t remember a time without some war going on somewhere.

[Closing piano music plays]